Chapter 7: Grace Morgan’s Offer

I hadn’t set foot in Grace Morgan’s studio in three years, and I still remembered exactly which stair creaked.

Third from the top. I stepped over it before I’d even registered why, old muscle memory from the years I’d interned here, hauling fabric bolts while Grace shouted measurements like a general commanding a small, tired army. The smell hit next, chalk and steam and fresh-cut silk, and something in my chest ached with homesickness I hadn’t expected.

“You’re late,” Grace said, without looking up from the mannequin she was pinning. “Which, frankly, is the first thing about you that’s stayed consistent.”

“I got married.”

“So I heard.” She stuck one final pin in place and turned, sharp eyes moving over my face like she was assessing a hem for flaws. Whatever she found, her expression softened. “You look tired, Evelyn. Tired in a way that isn’t about the wedding.”

“It’s been a strange month.”

“Sit.” She gestured toward the worn velvet chair by the window, the same one I used to curl into during lunch breaks. I sat, and she poured tea from a kettle that had probably been simmering since morning, strong enough to strip paint. “Sophia called me. Told me you’d started drawing again.”

My stomach dropped slightly. “She had no right to do that.”

“She had every right. Friends meddle when they love you.” Grace sat across from me, studying me over her cup. “I also heard, through channels I won’t name, that Adrian Collins filed the Phoenix collection under his own name three weeks before he divorced you.”

I set my cup down carefully, my hands suddenly unsteady. “You knew?”

“I suspected.” Grace’s voice went hard, rare for her. “I recognized the wing sleeve the moment I saw the campaign photos. That silhouette belongs to no one but you. I taught you to draft it myself, in this room, when you were twenty-two and terrified of your own talent.”

Something cracked open behind my ribs, hearing her say it out loud. Confirmation, from someone who’d know, that what happened hadn’t been some misunderstanding I’d misread. It had been theft. Deliberate, calculated, and everyone who mattered had seen it and said nothing.

“Why didn’t you say anything then?”

“Because you weren’t ready to hear it.” Grace’s eyes didn’t waver. “You were still defending him at dinner parties, still telling anyone who’d listen how supportive he was. I wasn’t going to tear that fantasy down before you were ready to see it yourself.”

I opened my mouth to argue and found I couldn’t, because she was right, and some old, tired part of me hated her a little for being right.

“I’m ready now,” I said instead.

Grace studied me a long moment, the kind of assessment that used to make interns cry in the hallway. Then she stood, crossed to her desk, and returned with a folder, set into my lap without ceremony.

“What’s this?”

“An offer.” She sat back down, folding her hands. “Design a capsule collection under my house. Six pieces. Full creative control, my name backing yours until yours can stand alone, every design credited to Evelyn Hart. No shared byline. No fine print.”

My hands trembled around the folder. “Grace, I don’t know if I can build something that fast. The gala’s in three weeks, I already promised Damian I’d have something for that, and now—”

“Then let this be that something.” Grace’s voice gentled into something I hadn’t heard since I was twenty-two, sobbing in this chair after a failed sketch review. “You have the talent. You always did. What you didn’t have was someone standing beside you who wasn’t profiting off your silence.”

I looked down at the folder, at the contract inside with my name typed clean and unmistakable across the top, no shared credit, no asterisks, no fine print waiting to swallow my work whole the way Adrian’s had.

“Why now?” I asked. “Why help me now, after three years of nothing?”

Something flickered across Grace’s face, guilt maybe. “Because I let you walk out of here three years ago and marry a man I never trusted, telling myself it wasn’t my place. I’ve regretted it every day since. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

The door chimed behind us, and I turned to see a woman step through it, sunglasses pushed up into dark, glossy hair, moving with the kind of unbothered confidence that only came from being recognized everywhere she went.

“Grace, darling, please tell me the emerald gown is ready, I have the premiere Thursday and my stylist is having an absolute meltdown about it—” The woman stopped mid-sentence, her eyes landing on me, then on the sketches still peeking out from my bag. “Oh. Are those yours?”

“Harper, this is Evelyn Hart,” Grace said, something like pride creeping into her voice. “The designer I mentioned.”

Harper Stone crossed the room before I could process I was standing three feet from an actress I’d watched in a dozen films, plucking a sketch from my bag with the casual entitlement of someone used to taking what caught her interest.

“This,” Harper said, holding up the sketch of the gown I’d drawn for the gala, sharp lines like armor, a back that dared people to look, “is exactly what I’ve been trying to describe to every designer in this city for a year, and not one of them understood what I meant until right now.”

“It’s not finished,” I said quickly, embarrassed by how raw it still looked on paper.

“Finish it, then.” Harper’s eyes met mine, bright with a kind of interest that felt entirely different from the polite, careful attention I’d grown used to since the divorce. “I want to wear it to the Blackwood gala. If that’s not already spoken for.”

Grace’s eyebrows lifted, sharp and delighted, and I felt something shift in the room, some current changing direction beneath my feet, the way weather turns before you’ve felt a single drop of rain.

“I think,” Grace said slowly, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite name, “that Evelyn’s about to have a very interesting few weeks.”

I looked down at the sketch in Harper Stone’s hands, my name attached to nothing yet, my future suddenly cracking open wider than I’d let myself imagine in months, wider than I’d thought possible sitting in Adrian’s office with a stolen folder shaking in my hand, and felt the first real flicker of something I hadn’t expected to feel again so soon.

Hope.